Though we didn’t fully appreciate it at the time (we still had a lot to learn about Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears), Harry had done us all a favor, keeping him at the edge of the party like that. And I was granted my bountiful night, from which sculptures have already flowed and can flow again, if I can find my way back to the torch. People came with food, drink, musical instruments, even gifts for me: wood for the stove in the back, scrap metal for my Gorky, drawing paper stolen from the WPA Poster Workshop. There was a miraculous lot of food, mostly cold things like sausages, cheeses, gehockteh leber, potato salads, breads, bowls of depression Jell-O, and suchlike, but Harry’s sister Golda, always one for dramatic entrances and exits, came sweeping in out of the snowy night bearing a huge pot of steaming hot kasha with noodles and chicken gizzards, and O.B. and his girl brought backbone and dumplings and a kettle of hambone soup we warmed up on my hot plate with Leo’s beans. Oh boy, I can taste it still! Feel it, hear it still!
“I met a man the other day I never met before,
He asked me if I wanted a job ashovelin’ iron ore.
And I asked him what the wages was, and he said ten cents a ton,
And I said, Aw fella, go scratch your neck I’d rather be on the bum!
I am a bum, a jolly old bum,
And I live like a royal Turk…”
Even Simon turned up, unable to stay away, since it was he after all who’d arranged Maxie’s trip to Spain through his Party contacts. He and Harry managed to keep most of the crowd between them for the half hour that Simon stayed around, but it was good just to see them both in the same room again. Golda thought so, too, and gave Simon a big conspiratorial hug, though she carefully chose a moment when her brother was distracted, pushing Gus through another verse. Golda’s only heresy was her big heart, and no doubt they both forgave her. As they might, in the end, forgive each other. For all the horror of the Spanish Civil War, it was at least doing this, reconciling decent people like Simon and Harry. The Popular Front. I believe in the Popular Front — not in the military sense of a force allied by fear to confront a common enemy, but in the positive sense of an avant-garde of humankind drawn together by love and reason (even now I can hear Leo snorting at this, though it is he who lives by it) to create a better world. Like the hora they used to dance down near Herzl Junior College in Independence Square. At the time, watching them in their bouncy rounds, I thought they were silly. Grown-ups acting like kindergartners — like stupid little pishers, as my late uncle would say. I was twelve years old then and going senile. Now I only regret my two left feet. In Barcelona, they say, they have a dance much like it. That night I supposed I would soon be learning it. I told Maxie so: “I’m coming, too,” I said, lifting my glass, “as soon as I can.” He met my foolish grin with a solemn gaze. “You’re a good friend, Meyer,” he said. “You’re the best friend I have.” I was deeply moved by this, and thought: He’s saying goodbye. Suddenly I wished he wasn’t going. Farewells have always been easy for me, but this one wasn’t. I met Maxie a few years ago at the Jewish Training School and we became close friends as though in spite of our differences. I told him that day we met that I was making welded sculptures. He looked solemnly at his hands and said: “Well, I am making a nation.” He did not speak Yiddish, but pure Hebrew, though otherwise he was impatient with books and thought the fine arts a waste of practical skills. He seemed to think a nation was something you built entirely with your hands, and if he’s alive I’m sure he still does. But that night, at the party, he walked over and stood in front of my mask of Gorky. He stared up at it for a long time and then he said: “I don’t understand it, Meyer. I don’t know why anyone would do such a thing. But when I am away from here, I know it will be the most important memory I have of you. It will come to my mind and I will think about it then.” At that moment I felt certain he knew more about my work than anyone alive, but I didn’t know how to put this in words, so I said nothing. I regret that, of course, and have worried since that he might have thought he’d hurt my feelings.
Around us meanwhile the party was in full swing, and I was soon swept into it again, heating up food, rinsing forks and glasses, bringing in the ice I’d been making in buckets in the backyard and chopping it up with one of my sculpting chisels, joining in the songs (“Solidarity forever! Solidarity forever…”) and hugs and conversations, the laughter and shouting. “Salud, Meyer!” “Salud, Ilya!” I felt an unbelievable intensity welling up about me, even when the chatter was about nothing more serious than chainletters and chicken factories, Charlie McCarthy or Chick Webb…
“… In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold;
Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold.
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old.
For the union makes us strong!
Solidarity forever!
Solidarity forever…!”
There was a lot of talk about Spain, of course, about art and theater and music, writing, film, swing bands, politics, all the things these friends of mine were not only interested in, but working and living with every day. I thought: These are the most beautiful people in the world, I’m lucky just to be able to have them around me! “You will eat, by and by!” they sang, crowding up around the overloaded trestle table.
“The change from a handicraft mode of production to the machine age has alienated and isolated the artist,” Simon was saying over the noise, holding up the unfinished torso of a quarterback throwing a forward pass, “Meyer is fighting this alienation with his welding, don’t you see, humanizing, as it were, the industrial product…”
“No shit…”
“… Work and pray, live on hay,
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die!”
Simon took up a collection for the Brigade before he left, and Golda promised Maxie to keep a steady flow of cigarettes and warm socks coming to him in Spain, as she was already doing for Dave and the others. We drank to that. We were drinking to everything. And eating. And talking. “Hell, that guy’s got the imagination of a goddamn mirror,” someone said and winked at me. “Where’s the mustard?”
“Hold, Madrid, for we are coming,
I.B. men be strong…!”
Father Divine was mentioned, Mother Bloor, test-tube babies and Baby Snooks. “What I’m sick of is art as a kinda jazzy framed wallpaper for rich cats!”—this was O.B., his voice intense but his soft brown face smiling serenely: “Art’s gotta go public, baby!” I think we were talking about a New Masses article on the Ash Can School of American art, but at the same time all around us people were joking about O’Neill’s Nobel and Paul Muni’s Oscar (“Imagine! Our own little Muni Weisenfreund!”), endorsing Sal Hepatica (“One dose, honey, and I was relaxed as twilight!”) or arguing about John L. Lewis as Working-Class Hero or capitalist lackey or next President of the United States or the driver of a Cadillac V-12, and it was all getting mixed up, deliciously mixed up. “Sure, times are better,” Leo was saying, tugging on his long mustaches. “Sure, there’s more money around. You used to only get forty dollars to beat up a worker a couple of years ago. Now it’s sixty, and for breaking his legs a bonus and a paid vacation!”